NO IRISH UNIVERSITY has made the prestigious list of the top 100 most powerful university brands in the world.

The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings is topped by Harvard University in the United States, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Stanford University, the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford round out the top five on the list.

Compilers say the list, which is dominated by American and British universities, is definitive but also “based no nothing more than subjective judgement”.

The list is compiled by senior and published academics, who are described as “the people best placed to know the most about excellence in our universities”. More than 10,000 academics were asked to name the best institutions in their fields of expertise.

Princeton, Yale, and the California Institute of Technology also make the top ten.

The highest-ranking university outside of Britain and America to make the list is the University of Tokyo at number eleven.

Of the 100 universities on the list, 46 are in the US while 10 are in the UK and 6 are in Germany.

“A university’s reputation for academic excellence is absolutely vital to its success,” said Times Higher Education rankings editor Phil Baty. “While reputation is based on subjective opinion, in this case it is the informed, expert opinion of those in the know: experienced scholars from around the world”.

The list is a spin-off of the world university rankings. In the most recently rankings published in October, Trinity College Dublin made 129th on the list while University College Dublin climbed to 161st on the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

The top 10 in full:

1. Harvard University
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3. Stanford University
4. University of Cambridge
5. University of Oxford
6. University of California, Berkeley
7. Princeton University
8. Yale University
9. California Institute of Technology
10. University of California, Los Angeles

Read: Trinity College Dublin falls 19 places in world university rankings >